The processor is the heart of a PC, and in many current gaming laptops you'll find a quad-core 7th Generation Intel Core i5 or Core i7 CPU based on the Kaby Lake chipset. Intel's new 8th-generation "Coffee Lake" CPUs launched a few months back in laptops, however, so you can expect them to become the norm going forward. Many of the Coffee Lake chips you'll see in gaming laptops include two more cores (six, instead of four), bringing more overall speed and much-improved performance on multithreaded tasks, but the upside for gaming is relatively minimal.

HyperX's Pulsefire FPS wants to be the go-to gaming mouse for FPS titles, as you might have guessed from the name. For $50, you're getting a razor-focused gaming mouse that boasts a Pixart 3310 sensor and the standard—but very welcome—four DPI settings, switchable via a central button. The Pulsefire FPS naturally pairs with the HyperX Alloy FPS gaming keyboard, with both featuring handsome, red-and-black wrapped cables.
A guide to getting the best gaming laptop under $500 can be a little tricky because of the budget constraint. But thanks to our team of experts, it’s finally here. Irrespective of whether you are a student, a household, an employee, or a developer, there is one common aspect which everyone uses their laptop for. Any guesses? Well, it is undoubtedly the gaming caliber of a laptop of which every user aspires about. Not all the laptops out in the market can be justified as a gaming machine, and not everyone can afford the expensive gaming laptops. Therefore, we have brought you the best available budget laptops in the market which are ideal for gaming along with all other day-to-day activities.
As you might expect, a $1,300 gaming laptop won’t perform as well as a top-of-the-line one—but not everyone has $2,000 to spend on a high-end gaming laptop. Our cheaper gaming laptop picks can still play many AAA games on high settings at 1920×1080 resolution, with exceptions for very new or demanding games such as Shadow of the Tomb Raider or Assassin’s Creed Odyssey. It’ll serve you well for classic games and less-demanding modern ones like Overwatch, Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds, or Doom (2016), and you can expect it to play most games on at least medium settings for the next few years.

Some features that are must-haves in non-gaming laptops aren’t quite as important here. Poor speakers can be bypassed with a good pair of headphones, and most people use a mouse instead of the trackpad while gaming. Battery life and portability have never been the strong suits of gaming laptops, which spend most of their lives plugged in and stationary.

For many years, the term “gaming laptop” referred to a highly powerful, exceedingly expensive, very large, and extravagant looking computer that usually had very limited battery autonomy. It was more or less equivalent to a high-end desktop computer that had the advantage of being portable (and which was generally used to showcase its manufacturer’s most advanced hardware).
We checked out all best sales from all the major retailers, including Best Buy, the Microsoft Store, Walmart, and B&H, and have compiled the hottest sales on laptops for you below. Simply read our brief descriptions, and scroll through and then click the “Buy Now” button on the laptop or 2-in-1 you’d like to buy. A new tab will open up and you’ll be sent to your retailer and product page to complete your purchase. We’ll update these deals, and keep you up to speed with all the freshest deals as the annual holiday shopping season progresses.
If I was buying a gaming laptop I would buy one with a great screen and a fast CPU with an integrated GPU. Then buy one of those separate External Graphics Card Docks. You can put whatever GPU you wanted in there and could readily update your GPU. This would give you a great laptop for everyday use and when you thought you needed to game somewhere you could bring the External Graphics Card Dock.
We also liked the fast solid state drive, the sharp FHD IPS wide-angle display, and the 6-cell battery which delivered over six hours of performance. All this is packaged into an only one-inch thick body. Speaking of the laptop's case, it includes two cooling fans, three exhausts, plus large vents to keep temperatures low. Cooling is top notch! The Dell Inspiron is a well-built gaming machine that combines smart engineering and great aesthetics.
We liked that this product offers a lot of pro features that you usually wouldn't find in a budget laptop. This includes a non-glare display, MSI's multi-monitor technology (powering up to three displays), and more. Nothing about this laptop feels cheap, except for the price (and that's a good thing)! MSI is known to make high-quality products and the CX62 is no exception.
Mice that are specially designed for RTS games and MMOs, on the other hand, look quite different. The most extreme come outfitted with an array of 10 or more programmable buttons. Usually set just under the tip of the thumb, these buttons can serve as simple shortcut triggers, or be programmed to execute longer macro commands. (For more on these mice, see our specialized guide to the best mice for MMO games.)
If we are to tell you about just how good the Proteus Spectrum is, there would be a lot of things to tell; for starters, the mouse costs half of what some of the flagship mice cost, apart from that, the mouse has an excellent value for money, 11 buttons that can be programmed however you want them to be, a comfortable design that doesn’t shy away from being stylish, and excellent tracking and response. So, without further ado, let’s take a look at the pros and the cons.
Several of the cheap gaming laptops we tested in 2018 couldn’t keep their WASD keys cool enough for comfortable gameplay. Note: We tested the Dell G5 with a GTX 1050 Ti, but we recommend the GTX 1060 Max-Q configuration. We confirmed with Dell that the G7 and G5 have identical fan and heatsink setups when configured with the same graphics processor.

The Full-HD display is impressive for its price tag and the fact that you can set it to a maximum of 1920 x 1080 pixels makes it far more suited to streaming high definition media. The Acer Aspire E E5-575-53EJ also features an SSD storage drive, which will mean super fast Windows boot speeds and much faster application loading times than traditional storage drives. However, the installed SSD only features 256GB of storage space, which will fill up quickly if you intend on installing loads of games or if you have a larger media collection. You can upgrade the storage drive at home, however larger SSDs do come with larger price tags and you might instead want to consider a good external storage drive for your media files.

Measurements performed by our colleagues at the Laptopmag website show that the MSI Titan achieves a maximum temperature of 59 degrees after 15 minutes of gameplay – which is not too bad. The Asus ROG Zephyrus has a maximum temperature of 67 degrees – which is still OK. However, the MSI GS65 Stealth’s maximum temperature of 90 degrees is likely to be problematic for some users.
While a lot of people might be bummed out to know about the downgrade, you actually shouldn’t pay attention to it. The reason is simple, while the Sabre RGB is certainly the cheaper option, a lower price, and a different design gives it an identity of its own, and that is certainly a good thing because, at the given price point, you are getting a mouse that is able to have an impressive 10,000 DPI, a good design that will attract most gamers, and not mention, RGB lighting. So, in simple words, gamers are paying less and getting more when it comes to the Corsair Sabre RGB.
As for the screen's native resolution, 1,920 by 1,080 pixels (commonly called 1080p) is now the norm in budget-priced and mainstream gaming machines. The more pixels you need to push, the more graphics power you need, and a savvy maker of gaming laptops won't outfit a laptop with a screen whose native resolution the GPU can't do justice. So the absence of higher-than-HD screens in budget gaming machines is no accident. Not only do such screens cost more and sap more battery life, but the graphics chips found in under-$1,000 gaming rigs wouldn't power gameplay on them very well. (Screens with resolutions higher than 1080p tend to look small and squinty at the 15-inch size, anyway.)
Take your PC gaming on the go with a laptop. A good gamer laptop will outpace the newest gaming consoles when it comes to sheer computing power, but you can also enjoy a great gaming experience with many low-to-mid-tier gaming laptops. A key element for the best PC gaming experience is computing power, so good gaming laptops are usually more powerful than standard laptops.
Sizing up the current state of the gaming laptop market, 8th Generation CPUs for notebooks are still the default, although we've seen at least one laptop with the Core i9-9900K. NVIDIA has launched their desktop GPU refresh with the Turing based GeForce RTX lineup, but as of yet has not done the same for their laptop chips, so Pascal based GeForce GTX still rules the roost. On the AMD side, mobile Vega was not dead, as some feared, but is currently only available in the latest MacBook Pro, and not yet in gaming laptops.
Some manufacturers have opted for an intermediate and less expensive solution; that is to say, a hybrid hard drive (SSHD) which incorporates a very small SSD (8 GB) in order to optimize the storage system’s performance. However, the performance of this type of drive remains slightly inferior to that of a fully fledged SSD. Intel’s Optane technology is used on some of these hybrid systems, and it works quite well…
Like the Dell G7, the Legion Y530 has a 15-inch 1920×1080 IPS display with a 60 Hz refresh rate. But the Y530’s small bezels set it apart from other cheap gaming laptops, making games feel more immersive and allowing the whole laptop to be smaller. The Y530’s display looked better than those of other laptops in its price range like the Dell G3 and Acer Nitro 5, which had green and blue color tints. The Y530’s screen was also among the brightest we tested at 266 nits, beaten only by the exceptionally bright screens of the more expensive Asus TUF Gaming FX504GM and Acer Predator Helios 300.

Purists will argue that you need a PC to truly play games, especially if you're a fan of pushing the levels of graphics quality beyond the capabilities of a mobile phone or a mere gaming console. In this regard, the gaming desktop is still king, particularly when it comes to having the kind of components and horsepower needed to run 4K games smoothly and support virtual reality (VR) setups, such as the Oculus Rift and the HTC Vive. But if you want or need something you can tote around the house or over to your friend's place, we're here to help you choose the right gaming laptop.

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And thanks to Nvidia's 1050 Ti GPUs, you can hook up an Oculus Rift and jump into the virtual realm. However, some companies like Dell and Gigabyte are outfitting their rigs with Nvidia GTX 1060 Max-Q GPUs so fans of the HTC Vive can also get in on the fun. Or if you're not ready to make such a big financial or space commitment, you can hook up one of Microsoft's new MR headsets like the Acer Windows Mixed Reality AH101 headset, which has the added bonus of working with either discrete or integrated graphics. Best of all, you can use all that money you just saved to splurge on a top-notching gaming keyboard or mouse.